Friday, April 24, 2009

Brilliant/hungry

Have you ever been a Starving Artist, and did it make you brilliant, or just hungry?

In my twenties I memorized the prices of the cheap meals I regularly ate — the lunch special at Taj Mahal on 4th Street, for example, or the big roast chicken at the now defunct Cuban Chinese place near 100th. I would make sure I had the exact change necessary for the tip, so that I could put the money on the table and leave quickly. I don’t know that this had any value beyond contributing to my ability to tell you this story now, years later.

Reminds me of a line a student of mine wrote a very long time ago now, in a creative writing assignment (for the Daily Themes class as taught by Wayne Koestenbaum, probably spring of 1996): "When I'm hungry, I memorize well." Hmmm, I wish I could remember that student's last name, I would think she's probably still writing...

3 comments:

I am actually teaching a class in the fall where I'm going to try and capture some of the flavor of Daily Themes - only I will not have a team of TAs to do tutorials, so I have to figure out how to make this work...

Cheap meals in a restaurant is not starving. It's not even hungry. And chronic malnourishment affects brain function. Bah, anyone who wants to write ought to be obliged to work first for a few years where people are genuinely hungry.

About Me

I have published four novels and two books about eighteenth-century British literature; my latest book is "Reading Style: A Life in Sentences." I teach in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.